The big day

We woke up early to check out and to be ready for this long day.

The competition started with the first presentation : Kera10. So, let's present the teams :

bio-science diagnostic

A simple diagnostic test for the fast and efficient diagnosis of specific tumors. Based on the concept of the home pregnancy test, the idea is easily adapatable towards other diseases.

INKeyboard

This is an innovative technology-based keyboard. The new product innovates the keyboard experience by introducing e-ink buttons, which allows for more flexibility, fulfilling a widespread need among computer users.

Kimeltu

Kimeltu is a web platform which allows educators to measure students performance and to monitor their progress by taking easily generated tests. It’s a freemium service where any person can create tests to be taken by a limited amount of students by choosing questions from a “public question bank” or by adding their own questions to the bank. Institutions can pay to generate their own, private question bank and to have access to detailed analysis of their students’ progress with easy-to-understand statistics. It also helps to validate and measure questions' difficulty, guaranteeing high quality tests. In the future, it will become an e-market where institutions can sell or share their question banks with others.

Kera10

Kera10 is the cosmetics arm of bio-materials regenerative company KN LLC. Kera10 has exclusive access to the proprietary biomedical grade keratin. Its parent company, KN LLC, manufactures and protects with 26 patents. Kera10 has demonstrated that this purified keratin performs better than the crude industry norms, and will provide innovative solutions to meet the ever changing demand for new products in numerous multi-billion dollar cosmetic industries.

Lujure

Lujure provides an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop platform that empowers everyone to easily create stunning Facebook fan pages. Our platform allows folks to grow their brands by creating fan pages that help with engaging their fans. We are constantly trying to stay ahead of our competition and it is important to us that we provide the best and most reliable fan page creation service.

OOHLALA Mobile

OOHLALA is a mobile application that helps college students navigate their campus life, and provides a platform to student unions, and services to engage with students.

We are the 3rd scheduled presentation. We are quite nervous but we have rehearsed a lot and are ready to do this. Actually, we did a great job, but respond to question is a little more difficult and our answers are less precise.

The competition continues and we assist the other presentations. Every team has done a really really good job. The VT team did show us what really looks like a american presentation/show ! Everybody can win...

In the evening, we had a ceremony to announce the winners. Everybody was there : teams, hosts families, organizers, jury...

And finally, th winners are :

Kimeltu ($25 000), Bio-science diagnostic ($5 000) and OOHLALA Mobile ($5 000).

We all went then to the German Club, a big fraternity of VT to get the pressure down.

3rd day at Virginia Tech

Another day, the same trip… This day started with high emotions. When preparing the bags, we ranged our suits hoping to be prepared for the big day.

“Did I learn my speech by heart?” That’s what every one asked himself when we took the WIFI-equipped bus to Roanoke. After leaving our luggages in the hotel, we went to the Taubman Museum of Art just next to the hotel. A volunteer showed us the museum. Very interesting tour I have to say! Some artworks had nice stories. That was what captivated us the most.

The tour was followed by a quick launch in the sunny yard of Norah’s Café outside the Museum. We joined the hotel after that to sit in for Jim Flowers’ presentation. The main topic was, of course, entrepreneurship. We got many tips about how to succeed in a start-up. The conference was illustrated by a lot of examples showing the keys of the success.

We checked in the hotel by 4:00 pm. Well, this day especially, most of the teams had chosen to get to know more about the others. You could see many groups of different teams wandering together in the hotel or having diner together. Speaking of diner, it was an incredible prestigious reception, quite formal. The mayor of Roanoke and some other personalities attended it. A group of music and a group of dancing were playing during the buffet while we were talking to some people about our project. It was a pretty nice moment before joining our rooms in order to rehearse, the eve of the event.

In fact, we were waiting for the demo to be sent to us, so we can illustrate our presentation with a concrete application. Once we received it, we put all the slides together. We spent a long time rehearsing and trying to refine, as much as we could, our 10 minutes presentation. We couldn’t sleep without making sure that no detail was neglected.

To wrap up this long day, we went to bed for few hours before the big day…

The WePulse Team

2nd day at VT

The second day… The wake up was a bit earlier. We had to get ready to our first presentation in front of our host company: “Adaptative Technology Inc”. Our host families drove us to their headquarter at 9:00. 5 persons cheerfully welcomed us. We recognized 3 of them. They shared our table yesterday in launch. We timidly started our presentation. Some parts were missing. But, it was a first real attempt of it. Then we exchanged some points with “our dear company”. Every one of them tried to improve some points. Well, we hadn’t got to change the thread of our presentation but we got to highlight the points that we had neglected. The conversation was very fruitful. Our second attempt to present was obviously better. At 11:30, our coaching company’s member invited us to a Mexican restaurant in Christiansburg. There, we talked more about Adaptative Technology Inc when eating a very tasteful meal. Our meeting with Adaptative Technology Inc ended there. Well, it is an opportunity to thank them through these words.

The afternoon seemed to be very entertaining. It was a nice discovery of a huge campus with outstanding sports facilities worthy of a professional club. The biggest surprise was a 65 000 places football stadium: The Lane Stadium. We had a detailed presentation of it before going for a short tour in downtown.

Meanwhile, an earthquake hit Blacksburg and other places. All the media talked about it, but strangely we just didn’t feel it.

The day ended with a very lovely dinner with our host families. It was another opportunity to get to know more each other. Then, we just went to sleep. It was a quite a tough day before leaving to Roanoke the next day.

The WePulse Team

First day in Virginia Tech, the contest looks hard!

We landed on Sunday at Roanoke airport, then we met our host families. We spent the evening with them, hoping to be in a good shape for the week that we had been looking forward for months.

On the Monday, at 11:00 AM, Jim Flowers welcomed us and explains the program of the week. He also showed us the amazing prize of the Challenge and the big 25 000$ cheque reserved for the winning team!

We met the other teams, from US, Canada, England, Chile, Austria and Italy that quickly presented their speech elevator. All the projects are original and the contest looks difficult.

We also met our host company, Adaptive Technologies Inc that develops intelligible communications systems and hearing protection. We shared our lunch with five people from their staff and they enjoy our project !

On the afternoon, Jim Flowers explained us what was expected by the judges, and we worked the whole afternoon.

For the dinner, we went to a restaurant with all the teams and the host families. We met Artbeating members who are spending some months in Virginia Tech. An acapella chorale band came to sing several amazing songs.

We went back at home, wainting for the next day, and the approaching contest...

New summer, new blogger

Hi everybody !

Finally, after a great competition, it is WePulse (formerly impulse) who won the special prize of the 2011 Entrepreneurial Project Challenge and succeed to Artbeating and MulteeGaming. As well, we would like to thank all the partners and organizers of this great adventure.

It is now time for us – WePulse – (and we are glad to do it) to resume control of this blog. We hope we will make you live this week at Virginia Tech as if you were here with us.

We will present our project there on Thursday and for those who don’t know it, here is a little summary :

With We Pulse you can buy tickets for a festival or cultural event, or make donation for charitable organizations from your Smartphone, in front of an ad in the metro or in a newspaper and in just 2 steps. Scan the QR Code on the advertisement and We Pulse will provide you with information on the product and lets you buy it! Thanks to We Pulse, shopping has never been so easy...and advertising has never been that effective!

You can follow us on twitter !

The WePulse Team